Surprising: British Airways Is Improving Their Economy Catering

For the past few years we’ve seen British Airways take a new “low cost” direction under the leadership of Alex Cruz, who used to run Spanish ultra low cost carrier Vueling (which is owned by the same parent company as British Airways). British Airways’ strategy seems to be to make the economy experience as bad as possible — they introduced food & drinks for purchase on intra-Europe flights, they’re adding more and more seats to their planes, etc.

So based on the precedent set by British Airways, I certainly wasn’t expecting them to make any improvements to their economy experience. Heck, just last year there were rumors that British Airways was considering introducing buy on board in longhaul economy.

Today British Airways has announced that they’re making improvements to the meal service in economy on longhaul flights, which will be introduced starting on January 17, 2018. The first flight to feature the improved catering will be BA117 to New York, and then it will be progressively rolled out from there. The plan is that the menu will change every six months.

British Airways claims that these changes will provide more quantity and quality to both meals and great snacking options throughout the flight.

Four-course meal with starter, main, dessert, cheese and biscuits, accompanied by a bread roll and bottle of water

Second meal or substantial snack depending on the length of the flight

Regional meal options served according to destination

Magnum ice-creams

Tuck box with chocolates and crisps

Hot breakfast on longer overnight flights

Graze movie-snack box on longer* flights

Complimentary drinks from the bar

Here’s a more in-depth description of what the service will look like:

The airline’s customers will be welcomed with pretzels and a drink. Once they are settled in, they will be served a four-course meal such as a starter of couscous salad, followed by a main course of chicken casserole with an ale sauce, colcannon mash and seasonal vegetables, or a vegetarian tomato, farfalle and vegetable dish. Dessert will be a Pots & Co salted caramel and chocolate mousse, followed by biscuits and cheese. The meal will be accompanied by a bread roll and a bottle of Highland Spring water.

On the shorter daylight long-haul flights to destinations such as New York and Dubai, fliers will also receive a sandwich such as egg and cress with a chocolate or Nutri-Grain bar. Those on longer daylight flights to destinations such as Cape Town and Hong Kong will receive a hot meal, such as a pizza wrap or a regional option, with a pot of pasta, a chocolate brownie and a drink as well as a smokehouse BBQ crunch Graze movie-snack box. A hot English breakfast will also be served on these longer flights that operate overnight.

Customers on daylight flights from London will be offered a range of Magnum ice-creams, while those on night flights will be offered a tuck-box with options such as Dairy Milk Buttons, Twix, Kit-Kats and Mini Cheddars, which will also be available in the galley for them to help themselves to.

Bottom line

Sometimes it’s tough to make sense of the strategies airlines take when it comes to where they cut costs and where they invest. In the case of British Airways, for the past couple of years all they’ve done is cut costs in economy, so it’s fantastic to see that they’ll be improving the experience a bit in one way for those taking a longhaul flight with them.

I’m still surprised to see this, though. With the competition they face from Norwegian, their strategy has been to basically match Norwegian on just about everything as much as possible. I don’t think that’s a good strategy, necessarily, since they’ll never be able to match Norwegian’s cost structure. So this is a step in the opposite direction, which I wasn’t expecting.

What do you make of British Airways investing in their longhaul economy experience?

American's catering in domestic first class has deteriorated greatly in the past several years. I don't want to say the food is inedible, because that would be a bit dramatic, but it's maybe just a notch or two above that. My general strategy nowadays…

Alaska Airlines has long been special as far as US airlines go. They've been viewed as Seattle's "hometown airline," and while other airlines have been devaluing their frequent flyer programs, cutting back on their inflight product, and introducing basic…

More from One Mile at a Time

Shopping portals can be a great way to maximize the miles & points you can earn, as they let you earn bonus points for purchases you'd make anyway. I always like to share any lucrative shopping portal bonuses that I think people could benefit from. If…

British Airways has been doing an incredible job with their marketing lately, and in particular with their “BA Magic” campaign. Through this, they encourage people to write in sharing a trip they’d like to take for a special reason, and British Airways…

The British Airways Visa Signature® Card is a pretty compelling credit card that a lot of people are eligible for. It has a generous sign-up bonus, Avios can be invaluable for shorthaul redemptions, and the card has some unique perks. So in this post…

There are a few good ways to save money for travel on British Airways that originates in the US: -- If you have the British Airways Visa Signature® Card, you can save 10% on the cost of a ticket using promotion code CARDOFFERU -- If you're an AARP member,…

One of the Chase credit cards that's relatively easy to get approved for and also lucrative is the British Airways Visa Signature® Card. The card has a generous sign-up bonus, and is potentially worth holding onto long term, regardless of whether you…

British Airways is in the process of refreshing their longhaul business class product, which they refer to as Club World. As part of this refresh, British Airways is introducing a new dining experience, better bedding and amenity kits, and a new Club…

About luckyBen Schlappig (aka Lucky) is a travel consultant, blogger, and avid points collector.
He travels about 400,000 miles a year, primarily using miles and points to fund his first class experiences.
He chronicles his adventures, along with industry news, here at One Mile At A Time.

Bring back proper food and in larger amounts. It seems in the last few years, the food portions have reduced, and basically I get hungry on most flights. I am all for it for them to bring it back up towards the good old days! Especially long haul.

I don’t see how this is different from current BA practise. On their overnight flights to Joburg they were typically serving a four course meal and then a hot breakfast (which on the outward leg is one of the best economy breakfasts around, perhaps save for the mezze breakfast that was long ago served on EK147). Other than the hot breakfast when leaving LHR the food is generally very bland in economy.

I think if they (meaning full service airlines) want to command a price premium in Economy they have to provide a good experience and this is smart – they are making the experience a bit nicer by providing some simple packaged/frozen snacks that couldn’t possibly cost much but add a lot to the experience of a traveler. An ice cream service may seem trite but it shows that you are being taken care of and is something special.

In economy, food and luggage are the only differentiators left. If those are not good or not needed, low cost will always win.

I recently had one of my worst airplane meals on BA IAD-LHR. One small meal for dinner, and I don’t even recall getting breakfast (maybe I was asleep, but seems unlikely considering I was sleeping fairly lightly and would have noticed lights coming on). Contrast that to my return AA MAD-IAD a week later, and it was like night and day. Felt like I was getting fed every 1.5-2 hrs and lunch was about twice the size of my dinner on BA.

Just flew them LHR-SIN on Wednesday evening on the 011. Dinner was not even filling and they did not have cookies or pot noodles or chips or basically any snacks in the galley for snacks on a 12 hour and 40 minutes flight. Utterly embarassing. Legacy CC were not even motivated and refused to get me snacks despite almost the whole of economy being asleep and no passengers in the galley. Only thing one CC offered me was fruit from someone else’s special meal for breakfast that the passenger elected not to have. Not concerned about the hot towels or eye masks or ear plugs but the last thing I’d want as a passenger is to be hungry and waiting till the next meal like its eternity and my body feeling uneasy when going through turbulence!! Almost felt like china eastern long haul in economy.

There are a lot of reasons I can think of for not flying BA not the least of which is the stench of curry that lingers in the cabin forever after they fire up their ovens. Even if it’s a non curry entree, it smells like curry from previous curry dishes heated in their ovens. Shouldn’t have to exit a BA flight smelling like a Bombay line cook. Progress would be dumping all curry entrees.

Like Anna above, i had one of the worst catering experiences long haul i have had on IAD-LHR a few years ago. A light dinner, and then for “breakfast” a cup of weak coffee and something that looked like a cross between a christmas pudding and a brick, wrapped in cellophane. Genuinely inedible. And that was it.

Combined with the uncomfortable seat, it made me vow not to fly BA econ long haul again, which is tricky to avoid as i live in London. By contrast and econ long haul flight on Delta last year (MXP-JFK) we were stuffed with food and numerous intervals throughout the flights, and tons of drinks. There was a service recovery shocker on the outbound but that’s off topic.

Yeah this is an about-face, but they have always treated their longhaul and regional operations very differently (you now get 3-4” more legroom in the long-haul config than the awful regional planes). I think this continues the trend of Cruz finallly realising (prob about 1-1.5 years ago now) that they had just cut way, way too far. Hence investment for elites (lounges) Biz class catering (rolling our too slowly but on a number of TA routes now), and now Biz class seat (adopting the Emirates a380 seats rather than trying to rescusitate their poor in-house 8-across design).

Longhaul coach generates a lot more customer feedback and expectations that regional, where they really do compete purely on price. This is another step in the right direction. God help us is Cruz finally listening to customers??

@ glenn t
Should someone realising they’ve made a mistake and then correcting it be a cause for (modest) celebration, rather than an excuse for childish name-calling?

I would criticise some of their choices (the Magnum brand is hardly an advert for high-quality food – but judging by the number of people who choose to buy them, I guess synthetic or chemical-laden sugar brands are enjoyed by most). But I am glad BA is for once actually focussing on improving the customer experience rather than cheese-paring cuts.

In my opinion, they should have picked up the dining concept recently introduced by Qantas, where you do get a bigger main meal portion and cut out those smaller side dishes which most of the time are just some dried up vegetables.

This will benefit both passengers and customers – in both real estate space taken on that tiny tray table and size point.

@The Nice Paul: No, BA’s still a long way from what it used to be, even what it used to be just 2-3 years ago. Virgin Atlantic’s by no means innocent in cutting services over the years, BUT unless you’re flying F on BA, I’ll take VS any day over BA.

Recent Trip Reports

Originally I wasn't planning on staying at the Hyatt Place Yerevan. However, after getting to the airport at 12:30AM, I was informed that my flight had been delayed by about 10 hours due to fog, meaning I needed a hotel for the night. Technically I could…

I was spending just over two days in Yerevan, as my flight arrived at around 1AM, and was scheduled to leave at around 3AM two days later. As a result I decided to book a hotel for three nights, since a 3AM departure would translate to a lot of time…

Living in DC, it's easy for me to take a weekend trip to New York every now and then. Winter is a decent time to do it, because hotels are cheap and there aren't a ton of tourists. (On the flip side, you do have to brave the cold and sometimes the snow.)…

This might be the most seemingly-random hotel review ever hosted on One Mile at a Time, but I'm super excited to share it with you guys. Last year I visited the town of Tonopah, Nevada and enjoyed a four-night stay at the darling and historic Mizpah…

Recent Posts

United has just announced a promotion offering discounted saver level award tickets to four of their destinations, including two of their new European destinations. Specifically, united is offering 20% off awards to: -- Porto, Portugal -- Reykjavik,…

The Etihad Airways Partners concept has been a colossal failure. Etihad invested in a group of airlines, gave them some Etihad touches, and tried to turn them into a global airline group. While I think the concept of that isn't necessarily bad, the problem…

Originally I wasn't planning on staying at the Hyatt Place Yerevan. However, after getting to the airport at 12:30AM, I was informed that my flight had been delayed by about 10 hours due to fog, meaning I needed a hotel for the night. Technically I could…

Qatar Airways loves having the newest technology when it comes to planes. In late 2014, Qatar Airways became the global launch customer for the A350-900, and I had the opportunity to attend the delivery ceremony in Toulouse. Yesterday Qatar Airways took…

Seeking: Savvy Miles & Points Enthusiast To Write For OMAAT

We have some amazing friends who have contributed to the blog over the years, and have learned a great deal during that time. Our ideas on what works, what doesn't, and the best ways to supplement what Ben is already writing have evolved, and we've tried…

Meet The Team

One Mile at a Time is owned by PointsPros, Inc. This site is for entertainment purposes only. The owner of this site is not an investment advisor, financial planner, nor legal or tax professional and articles here are of an opinion and general nature and should not be relied upon for individual circumstances.

Advertiser Disclosure: Some links to credit cards and other products on this website will earn an affiliate commission. Outside of banner ads published through the Boarding Area network, this compensation does not impact how and where products appear on this site. While we do try to list all the best miles and points deals, the site does not include all card companies or credit card offers available in the marketplace. Please view our advertising policy page for additional details about our partners.

Editorial Disclosure: The editorial content on this page is not provided by any entity mentioned herein. Opinions expressed here are the author's alone, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of these entities.